Valley Thieves (2 page)

Yet Denny missed on this occasion, because as he pulled his hand free and moved his Colt, Harry Clonmel got in motion, too. He took a step forward and hit McRae with the full sweep of his left arm. McRae's bullet drove under the shoulder of Clonmel, knocked a pipe out of the teeth of Pete Meany, and went slam into a big joist at the end of the room. McRae himself was lifted off his feet at the same instant by Clonmel's punch. There must have been lift as well as drive in that wallop, because McRae trailed in the air, turned in it, and landed with a whang, on his face.

Clonmel turned aside and emptied the cash drawer of the roulette outfit into his pockets. He was entirely calm. Excitement makes a man puff more than mountain climbing, but Clonmel was not breathing hard. He counted out the sum of money that he had lost, and since there was plenty more than that left, he pushed it over, and the crowd helped itself.

No one went near McRae, who began to lift himself from the floor. His face was a red blur. The punch had smashed his nose flat. His eyes were beginning to swell already, and the blood ran out of him in an amazing way. He looked as though he'd been slammed in the face by a fourteen-pound sledge, or the steel knuckle of a great walking beam. A trickle of red was even running out of his ears. It was a miracle that he could recover consciousness so soon.

However, he soon was on his knees, then on his feet, swaying, when his reserves opened a back door and came on the charge into the room. The bartender was one of them; two more were bouncers; they were all good fighting men, when it came to gun work, and I expected to see Clonmel go down full of lead.

Everyone else expected gunfire, too, and the boys dived for doors and threw themselves under tables.

But not a single weapon exploded. Harry Clonmel was the reason. He had picked up McRae by the neck and the belt, and now he heaved the gambler right at the three fighting men. They went down with a crash.

When they got up, they were headed in the opposite direction. They made tracks out of that room pronto.

I wanted to laugh, but I knew that it was no laughing matter. McRae was out of the picture, but not for long. He'd try to kill Clonmel. He
had
to kill Clonmel. If he were hanged for the murder, later on, that couldn't mean much more than what had already happened to him. He was a ruined man. The only thing he knew how to do was to run a saloon, and now the fame of his crookedness would travel all over the West. McRae might as well go out and howl with the wolves, and before he did that he would certainly try to get even with the giant.

Then there was the sheriff.

Well, the rest of the boys seemed to figure things the same way. They eased out of McRae's place as fast as they could go. Only Clonmel was in no hurry. He sat down, made a cigarette, and lighted it. I was amazed at him.

"Clonmel," I said, "do you have to stay here like this?"

He looked over at me and nodded.

"They may want to come back and talk," he said, "and I ought to be here to listen."

"Do you as much as carry a gun?" I asked him.

"No," said he.

It was the answer I expected, but it staggered me just the same.

"You've showed a lot of nerve and a strong hand, but you've had some luck, too," I said to him. "Now you go saddle your horse and get out of this town, because when McRae comes back, he'll have the sheriff with him!"

"The sheriff?" asked Clonmel. "Does he herd with crooked gamblers in this town?"

"The sheriff's the brother-in-law of McRae," I answered him, "and he doesn't know how to miss with a gun. And he's coming here to collect your scalp. Do you understand?"

He nodded. After what he had done, you would expect to see a bit of the savage in his face, but, on the contrary, there was no sign of that. Instead, he was simply shining with good nature and high color, like a small boy who has just finished a good round of tag. There was a blur of red on the knuckles of his left hand; that was the only mark that appeared on him. I could not help wondering what would have happened to the face of the gambler if Clonmel had hit him with his right. Now he sat back in his chair and continued to smile at me, though the sheen of his eyes had diminished a little.

"I understand that the sheriff is coming for me," he said. "I've never run away from a sheriff before and I don't want to begin doing it now. I'll stay here and wait."

I got so excited that I went up and grabbed him by the arm. It was like laying hold on the leg of a horse. I shook the heavy, loose weight of the arm and shouted:

"Clonmel, you don't know the sheriff. He's a killer. He'll kill you! Clonmel, do you hear me ? Can you use a gun?"

"I can hit things with a rifle, now and then," said Clonmel. "I never used a revolver in my life."

"You'll be murdered!" I cried at him. "You fool, I know what I'm saying."

Clonmel took hold of my hands gently and moved me a little away from him.

"You want to help me," he admitted, "but it's not any use, and I don't want you to get into trouble. If the sheriff wants to see me—well, I'll have to stay here till he arrives."

It was like arguing with a woman, adding up two and two and two, and finding that they make zero. Then, before I could say a word more, a door opened, and the sheriff stood there. He wasn't raging. He was all cold, and there was a stony smile chiseled out around his mouth.

"Clonmel," he said, "you're a bully and a big-mouthed cur. I've come to get you—in the name of the law!"

When he mentioned the law, his grin turned from stone to iron and froze wider on his face. Law? Well, it was gun law that he meant.

Clonmel swayed forward to rise. Then I shouted:

"Sit still! If you get on your feet, he'll murder you. Sheriff, this is an unarmed man!"

"You lie," said the sheriff. "The yellow dog is going to get up and fill his hand."

I got so angry that I forgot to be afraid. I jumped in between them and shook my finger at the sheriff.

Behind me I could feel Clonmel rising like a mighty shadow.

"If you pull a gun on him,". I yelled at the sheriff, "I'll have a lynching posse after you. I'll bring this up to the law courts. I'll tell 'em what I know—that Clonmel hasn't a gun! Milton, keep your hand away from that Colt!"

The sheriff managed to center some attention on me, when he heard this. He had worked himself right up to the killing point. Now he saw that raw meat was being snatched away from his teeth and he shuddered like a crazy bull terrier.

But the truth of what I had said struck him harder than bullets. I wasn't a drinking man; I wasn't a fighting man; I was, in fact, just a dull, ordinary drone of a worker, trying to make a home and paying my debts as they came up. For that reason, in a law court my testimony would be about ten times as heavy as all the thugs and crooks and hangers-on of the gambling dump put together. Besides, in a society of cowpunchers and young miners and prospectors, I was a fairly old man. All of these things began to add up in the mind of the sheriff. I could see them clicking in his eyes as big Clonmel pushed me gently to the side. The sweep of his arm was like the drive of a downstream current.

"I don't need anyone between you and me," said Clonmel to the sheriff. "You've used some language that—"

"Oh, hell," said Walt Milton, and turned on his heel and walked away.

Clonmel started after him. I ran in front of him and held out my hands. He walked into them. My arms buckled under the weight of him.

"Are you going to be fool enough to play his game?" I asked.

His lips worked a couple of times before he managed to unlock his jaws and answer:

"You're right. I've got to—I've got to learn how to shoot if I stay in this part of the country. If—"

He shut his teeth on the rest of it. Learn to shoot? Why, those hands of his were too big to be very fast, and what could he learn compared with the gun knowledge of men who were born with the smell of gunpowder in the air? He could only learn enough to make one first gesture, which would be his last. I could see the bullets smashing into his body, into his handsome face. It turned me sick.

"Clonmel," I said, "come up to my ranch and go to work for me. I'll teach you to shoot on the side."

It was the vaguest sort of a gesture on my part. I thought at first that he didn't hear me, because he was still staring through the doorway after Walt Milton. I was a good deal surprised when he pried his jaws open to answer:

"Thanks. I'll do it."

WHEN I got Harry Clonmel up to the ranch, I felt somewhat as though I'd landed a fighting pike in a small boat. There was going to be trouble ahead. How much trouble, I couldn't guess, but I imagined that one face of it would be Sheriff Walt Milton.

If only he had been the worst of it! But, of course, back there in the beginning of things, I couldn't dream what was going to happen. I simply knew that Clonmel was an explosive and that, when he burst, a good many things might be broken. But, like an old sea story, everything went well at first, and we had nothing but clear skies and cheerful days.

Clonmel liked the life up there in the Blue Water Mountains. He liked the air and the beauty of the big peaks. He liked my wife, and my wife liked him. Charlotte was a big, soft, pretty girl when I married her. She kept on getting bigger and softer, but she lost her prettiness. She used to rub her face with cold cream, a good deal, and she'd lie in bed late on Sunday mornings to rest her features, but the pink and the smile of her prettiness would never come back. She was a good, cheerful, hearty woman, in lots of ways, but she had a pride of her own. She spoke careful English, smiled at the lingo of the cowpunchers, and raised our boy with an idea in the back of his head that somehow he came of better blood than most. Such ideas are dangerous, of course, but Charlotte had to have something to keep her head in the air.

She said that Harry Clonmel was a gentleman and that he would be a good influence for our boy, Al. As a matter of fact, it was Al who seemed to be top dog of the two, most of the time. Al was twelve, tough as hickory, and knew all about range ways and mountain life. It was Al who became special instructor of Clonmel in using a rope, in riding bronchos, in shooting with a rifle or with a revolver. They spent every spare moment that he had on those jobs.

But all during the working hours of the day, Clonmel kept with me. I never saw a better worker, because he was the strongest man I've ever found, and in addition to that he had a fire of vast cheerfulness always stoked up and burning bright inside him. A cheerful man doesn't get tired easily; a cheerful man keeps his eyes open and knows what's happening around him. I never had to tell Clonmel things twice. He used his brain as much as he used his big hands.

And what hands—and what they could do! The meanest job on a ranch is building fence, but Clonmel could eat a hole in hard ground in no time, with a boring auger, and he would carry about an armful of the heavy posts as though they were fagots for the kitchen stove. There wasn't much need of a lever to pull the wire lines tight. A heave of his big shoulders was generally enough to draw the heavy barbed wire until it shuddered. Of course, there were a lot of things that Clonmel knew nothing about, but though he might start a day helplessly, he generally had done more work, by evening, than three ordinary hands, no matter how experienced they happened to be.

Nothing made him sick, either. He could shrug away weariness with one gesture of his shoulders, and at the end of a day he would wash, comb his hair, and sit down at our table, shining with good nature. I can tell you that we lived well while he was with us, because my wife worked overtime to please the taste and fill the huge maw of Harry. Her trouble was always repaid, because he could eat for five as easily as he could work for ten. He was a good talker, too, and he kept us laughing with his chatter when he sat about in the evening. There was only one thing that shut him up, and that was to ask him why he was in the West.

He dodged that question; all we could make out was that he was hunting for something or someone. He never would tell us precisely what he wanted, but we got the Idea that in our country, somewhere, he expected to find what he was looking for, and that, in the meantime, he was glad to grow accustomed to Western ways and harden himself in the new life. Whatever it was that he had before him, he apparently expected that it might take him a great part of his life.

Charlotte and I used to put our heads together and conjecture. I had an idea that he might have done something that forced him out of his home to save his neck. If he lost his temper in a fight, for instance, he might easily have killed a man. But Charlotte declared that no man outside the law could have an eye so open, so clear, and so bright.

Well, those were good days, take them all in all. Al and Harry slept up in the attic, and when Charlotte's alarm clock rattled the call for the day's work to begin, we'd hear the tremendous bellow of Harry in answer, like the booming of a bull moose.

Yes, those were good days, but they couldn't last long, and the first sign of the trouble to come was the appearance of a woman. Julie Perigord walked in on us, one afternoon, and knocked the spots out of our peaceful existence.

It happened like this:

The day had been hot and close, but in the middle of the afternoon the wind changed, a cloud showed its black shoulders in the northwest behind Mount Craven, and in twenty minutes the storm was screaming, and the cattle were drifting at a trot, lowering their heads away from the wind.

The sky blackened over. The chill blew through our bones. Winter came back in the middle of summer and darkened the world for us. I got hold of Harry Clonmel and took him back to the house with me.

He merely said: "This is all right. This is what a fellow sees from the lowlands, when the clouds come —zoom! Right across the heads of the mountains. I've always wanted to be inside the clouds, one day."

"You and the lightning, eh?" said I, and right on the heels of my words, the lightning started dancing in the rain like a hundred red devils.